UNTHINKING THE NUCLEAR PROBLEM

Richard LieferCHICAGO TRIBUNE

New thinking in Moscow has cascaded into Europe, changing attitudes about defense that challenge the U.S. view of what`s best for the Western alliance. Europeans are inclined to believe that Mikhail Gorbachev intends peace, but the Bush administration has come across as overcautious, at best, claiming to look at Soviet deeds instead of words and noting the adroitness with which Gorbachev practices global public relations. The President`s troop-cut proposal is a belated attempt to lead, not just react.

What is happening is the unthinking of the cold war in a discourse about troops, conventional and nuclear arms, containment, deterrence,

trustworthiness, leadership, levels of power and other matters. Important to this debate is the premise that international conflict and technology

(weapons) are givens, almost part of the natural order. Hence the discourse is destined to be fairly shallow.

''Unthinking the Unthinkable,'' a book published this week by Indiana University Press, argues that we shouldn`t always settle for so little, especially when it comes to survival issues like nuclear weapons. Its author is Jeff Smith, a Chicago area native and University of Chicago graduate who teaches writing at UCLA and whose articles have appeared on this page from time to time since 1984.

''What we need to do,'' he writes ''is to problematize the state, war, and technology-that is, treat them not as unavoidable facts to be simply accepted, but as problems to be analyzed and solved. For each rests on the other and on a whole set of prior conditions.''

And: ''States and their war policies are not mysterious, fixed edifices, thrusting up through the millennia like Stonehenge. They are products of cultural history, and once we see this, the problem of reinventing them appears in a whole new light.''

Cultural history is Smith`s lens. Through it he scrutinizes the problem of nuclear weapons, using a range of disciplines and media that include theology (original sin vs. human perfectibility), psychology, government policies and programs (Ronald Reagan`s SDI Initiative), history, literature

(Shakespeare), films (''Dr. Strangelove'') and books (''1984'').

His thesis-to grossly oversimplify a scholarly, complex treatise-is that The Bomb to which the world was introduced in 1945 did not so much mark the beginning of a new age as the outcome of ages past. Looked at this way, the beliefs, ideas and commitments that motivate bomb makers can be deciphered. And so can a solution to the nuclear problem, if only we analyze deeply enough.

Reagan`s Star Wars proposal is a good example of how the thinking of ordinary people can shape policy, Smith writes, ''for his thinking was nothing if not ordinary.'' Imbued with old cultural assumptions about America as a near-perfect blend pastoralism and technology, Reagan sought to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons-a failure of science-by urging that very science to transcend failure and return the world to an even keel.

''Reagan`s outlook, and its concrete embodiment in SDI, is an attempt at a new synthesis that would achieve the same purpose as the old synthesis of technology and garden. It is an attempt to recover the virtue that once was felt to inhere in technology, and, under the old synthesis, in America too.'' In this way Star Wars was old, not brand-new.

Smith wants to reach beyond academe with ''Unthinking the Unthinkable.''

Worthy as it is, his first book will have to fight for a spot in the public affairs reading room, a realm full of variety in styles and quality, in writers` credentials and degrees of celebrity and, inseparable from the latter, in the ease with which a voice gets heard in book form. Three other relatively new books are illustrative.

Smith may be a household name, but ''Jeff Smith, writer'' is not. Carl Bernstein, on the other hand, the prize-winning Watergate reporter and author of ''Loyalties,'' re-enters the public forum more easily and prominently, describing the impact of a Truman executive order under which federal employees were brought before loyalty boards. Bernstein earned this kind of access, but on his record as an aggressive journalist, not by dint of scholarship or a pleasing personality. (He was a hell-raiser at an early age.) Where Bernstein strives (not always successfully) to clarify and interpret events of about 40 years ago, Sen. Paul Simon rehashes last year`s presidential campaign in ''Winners and Losers,'' a disappointing book by a politician who hides his writing ability here while saying little that`s fresh. Among the more interesting tidbits of information are that his family gets upset when he trims his own hair and that readers of a church magazine objected to his describing himself as ''an inadequate Christian,'' which is really the only kind. But if you were a book publisher, would you have said no to one of the ''Seven Dwarfs''?

Nor would any sensible publisher reject former Sen. J. William Fulbright, author, with Seth P. Tillman, of ''The Price of Empire.'' And rightly so. Here is a statesman whose accomplishments are behind him, who has no need to curry favor-even if that were in him-or plan the next campaign. Rather, in clear, unadorned prose, he restates the thoughtful positions for which he is famous: nonintervention, empathy instead of antipathy toward other political systems, evenhandedness in the Mideast, and others. Not surprisingly, Fulbright is proudest of the educational exchange program that bears his name.

And that brings this back to Jeff Smith, a Fulbright scholar in Britain in 1984-85. Research done in connection with his Fulbright project led to this book. The history-creating discussion he both champions and practices comes in many shapes, serves many masters (cosmic and trivial), and thrives or withers for reasons often not obviously related to intrinsic merit.

By advocating in-depth analysis of a culture that made nuclear weapons thinkable, Smith furthers a vital discourse and counters hopelessness. Maybe when the nuclear problem is solved, he can concentrate on unthinking the publishing business.